Wednesday, January 14, 2015

IBM Announces New Mainframes

Everybody knows -- or should know -- that the mainframe is the work horse of the IT industry, but the new z13 boasts some amazing capabilities. The z13 can process 2.5 billion transactions a day. And those transactions are persistent, protected and auditable end-to-end! Furthermore, the z13 delivers practical real-time encryption based on 500 new patents, including advanced cryptographic encryption technologies. And the z13 comes with embedded analytics capabilities.

“Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world's most secure data centers in the palm of your hand," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems.

To put this amount of power into context, IBM notes that a single z13 mainframe can porcess more than 30,000 transactions per second, which is roughly the same as 100 Cyber Mondays every day!

IBM has designed the z13 to integrate real-time scoring and guarantees this capability as a feature of the system. This scoring can be used for fraud detection on 100 percent of a client's business transactions. To take advantage of this capability customers must be running the latest versions of DB2 and SPSS Scoring Adapter on z13 machine, as well as following IBM's capacity planning implementation instructions and processes.

For the long-time mainframe zealots out there, of which I am one, it always gives me a warm feeling inside when IBM comes out with a new line of mainframes. The mainframe always leads the IT industry in terms of processing power and capabilities... and it looks like it will continue to do so well into the future...